Posted on 02/18/2008 6:43:20 AM PST by processing please hold
The Cult of Obama
Excitement over the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is reaching unparalleled heights, as he has won all eight caucuses and primaries since Super Tuesday. His campaign is raising a million dollars a day—double the rate of Hillary Clinton’s. The Economist is calling him “a political phenomenon.”
But an increasing number of commentators—including some on the liberal side—are discussing a worrisome undercurrent in the trend: the fact that it is all about Obama the personality rather than Obama the potential president. Ignoring substance, an almost religious fervor is building in support of this untested politician.
The National Post quoted one woman at a rally saying,
“Are you kidding me? I’d walk over hot coals to vote for this man. I mean, oh, he’s just … he’s a man that can change not our country, but the world.”
In his weekly column, Charles Krauthammer assembled some disturbing tidbits:
[T]he Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a “salvational fervor” and “idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria.”
“We are the hope of the future,” sayeth Obama. We can “remake this world as it should be.” Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country — nay, we can become “a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest.” …
ABC’s Jake Tapper notes the “Helter-Skelter cult-ish qualities” of “Obama worshipers,” what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times calls “the Cult of Obama.” Obama’s Super Tuesday victory speech was a classic of the genre. Its effect was electric, eliciting a rhythmic fervor in the audience—to such rhetorical nonsense as “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek.”
That was too much for Time’s Joe Klein. “There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism,” he wrote. “The message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.”
You might dismiss as hyperbole the complaint by the New York Times’s Paul Krugman that “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.” Until you hear Chris Matthews, who no longer has the excuse of youth, react to Obama’s Potomac primary victory speech with “… I felt this thrill going up my leg.” When his MSNBC co-hosts tried to bail him out, he refused to recant. Not surprising for an acolyte who said that Obama “comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament.” …
Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He’s going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can’t possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war — with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.
The Weekly Standard calls Mr. Obama “The Magical Democrat”:
It makes one feel like a killjoy to point out that Barack Obama is merely a man, and a politician at that. At the risk of being even more of a sourpuss, one can note that, in spite of the meaning he’s already giving to so many people’s lives, Obama is a thoroughly conventional liberal.
As an aside, James Taranto printed this collection of news items about people fainting at Obama’s campaign rallies, and Breitbart tv has this clip telling the same story.
I wonder if that womans dead or did her people get here out in time.
Now that's a bit over the top. I recall some loony lefties saying much the same thing about Reagan, citing among other things the fact that each of the three names in his full name (Ronald Wilson Reagan) contained six letters . . . 666.
“You have to ask yourself, when was the last time the leftist liberal media supported anything having to do with religion. Looks like they’re trying to lure Christians into supporting this Messiah wannabe. If that doesn’t make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up nothing will.”
The Left is fooling Christians, no question about it. But in so doing they are taking a page out of the Republican playbook of the past 8 years. The real legacy of the Bush Administration is a string of smoking ruin Eastern Christian churches from the Adriatic to the Iran/Iraq border and now the Mohammedan terror statelet Kosovo where our troops and those of our NATO allies, on account of the rules of engagement, stand guard as the howling jihadis of Kosovo ravage what’s left of the Christian community there.
And here in America, the surest supporters of that anti-Christian foreign policy of the likes of Bush and McCain are the evangelicals. Maybe those people and their preachers don’t understand what they have been paying for, but in all honesty, I think they know exactly what they have been doing.
Bingo except it’s the Mahdi.
http://obamamessiah.blogspot.com
A lot of them have forgotten what church was like and the young ones have never been. The 60s radicals know something is missing, but they think it’s the social justice of Martin Luther King. Obama, great former debater, takes on the style of MLK (down to the mannerisms), so they have church, without church. The church of socialism. This is their ‘faith and hope’ religion.
A must see, since you survived my rant:
I really want someone to re-do this video but with Obama pointing during the rallies...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lvU-DislkI
I don’t do this to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, God knows.
Let’s just say Obama stating his favorite bible verse was The Sermon on the Mount... was a tip off. One of many when he refers to things scriptural. As we know, his pastor preaches a different gospel more than THE gospel.
This country is in for one helluva ride no matter who becomes president with the three choices laid at our doorstep.
Creepy is exactly right.
An obama sycophant.
Socialism IS SLAVERY by Government.. caused by democracy which is Mob Rule by mobsters and a criminal enterprise like in Russia and China and probably India..
OBAMA is for change alright..
Have you ever heard anything of substance coming from this man, I havent?
Never thought I would see a politician that could out slick Slick Willie
Ain't that the truth. The king is dead, long live the king.
Reagan inspired people to believe in themselves, OBAMA inspires people to believe in HIM.
Can we please hold our fire on Obama until Hellary is beaten the Primary? And please don’t reply with any nonsense about how Hellary will be easier to beat. Thats just being stuck on stupid.
I see them doing business together. obama would only hold a grudge against any friends of America.
Exactly. Many of us, in our legitimate loathing for the Witch, are overlooking how frightfully dangerous Obama is. Right now the worst thing that can happen to us is for him to blow out the Witch in the remaining primaries; the best is for her narrowly to steal the nomination from him. If she wins that way, the DemonRats will be so divided that we'll be able to beat them and, quite possibly, regain Congress, in which case there will be enough conservatives to counteract McCain's worst policies. This means that, horrible idea though it may be, we should cross over in the remaining primaries and vote for the Witch.
I remember an article I read many years ago concerning hitler. Appeasing his annexing one country at a time until it was too late.
Kosovo is the Austria of today. (if I have my annex time line correct)
Yes they do. That should give everyone pause. Do his supporters think they’re electing a God or a man? Looking at his rallies, I know what my answer would be.
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